As the popularity of email communication has grown, so too has the number of email messages received and stored in user accounts. A user account typically includes all the messages sent to and from a respective email address or user name, excluding messages deleted from the account. However, some user accounts may be associated with a plurality of email addresses or user names, sometimes called aliases, which together may be considered to be a single logical email address or user name. The amount of received email can quickly overwhelm users—making it difficult to sift important messages from unimportant ones.
Additionally, many people now access and view their email on mobile devices, such as handheld computers or cell phones. Such mobile devices typically have small screens with even smaller message windows or interfaces for viewing messages. These interfaces often allow the user to view only a small number of messages at any given time, thereby requiring the user to interact more frequently with the interface to locate important messages, such as through scrolling through the messages. Such mobile devices may also employ network connectivity, which is sometimes charged by usage and is often slow. Users of these devices might wish to limit the messages they view to those of high importance when accessing message through this medium.
To deal with these problems, some message interfaces allow users to organize messages into folders or to apply user-defined labels to messages for easier identification. Additionally, in some email applications, users may order messages in a particular view in accordance with the value of single user-selected message header field, such as message delivery date, sender, or message title. However, these organizational techniques often fail to identify the messages that are most important to the user, leaving the user to scroll through many messages before locating the messages that he or she considers to be most important.